There is a particular quality to the air inside the Simply Being Therapy office in Berry Hill, Nashville. It is the kind of space that seems designed not just for comfort, but for permission — permission to slow down, to exhale, to arrive exactly as you are. Soft lighting. A blanket folded over the arm of a couch. A warm cup of tea resting on a wooden table. And somewhere in that quiet, a sense that something real and important is about to happen.
This is the world that Dr. Barbie Hessel built. She is the founder of Simply Being Therapy, a somatic trauma therapist in Nashville, TN, and one of the most credentialed, most carefully trained integrative healing practitioners in the American South. Her story — educator turned clinician, first-generation college graduate, and the woman who transformed a bold mid-life pivot into one of Nashville’s most respected boutique therapy practices — is the kind that stays with you.
By the end of this piece, you will understand not just who Dr. Barbie Hessel is, but why it matters. If you have been searching for a trauma therapist in Nashville, TN — someone who brings both clinical mastery and radical humanity to the work — what you are about to read may feel like the answer you didn’t know you were looking for.
From Educator to Healer — The Founding Story of Simply Being Therapy
Every meaningful story has a turning point — a moment when the life being lived no longer fits the life being called toward. For Dr. Barbie Hessel, that moment came after nearly two decades of doing work she was genuinely good at, in a field she genuinely loved, and still knowing, with a quiet but unshakeable certainty, that something more was waiting.
Dr. Barbie spent close to twenty years as an educator, university professor, and staff developer before she made what she calls a very significant life transition. Her academic career was substantial by any measure. She served as an adjunct professor at Belmont University and Aquinas College in Nashville. She worked in staff development at the Montgomery County Public School District in Washington, D.C. She held adjunct professor positions at Johns Hopkins University and American University — two of the most respected institutions in the country. She had earned an MS in Education and, as the capstone of her academic life in that chapter, a doctoral degree from Nova Southeastern University. Her Ed.D. research focused on accessing Voice and Self-authorization in adolescent girls — a subject that, in retrospect, was already planting the seeds of everything that would come next.
To walk away from all of that — from the titles, the tenure-track trajectory, the professional identity carefully built over twenty years — took a particular kind of courage. The kind that isn’t loud or dramatic, but is instead slow and sure, arriving in the body before it arrives in language. Dr. Barbie describes returning to graduate school at the University of Tennessee as profoundly humbling. “It was such a huge transition to find myself back at university pursuing another graduate degree at the age of 36,” she reflected in a 2023 feature with NashvilleVoyager. She chose to study social work with a specific focus on trauma treatment — and in doing so, she chose the harder, more demanding, more human path.
After earning her MSSW, Dr. Barbie joined the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville, where she spent formative years doing some of the most difficult and meaningful clinical work imaginable. Holding space for survivors of sexual violence is not work that everyone is equipped to do. It demands not just training but a particular quality of presence — an ability to be fully with another person in their pain without being consumed by it, to remain steady when the territory is anything but. Those years shaped Dr. Barbie’s specialization in complex and sexual trauma at the deepest level, and they live inside every session she facilitates today.
From that foundation, she opened Simply Being Therapy in Berry Hill, Nashville — now located at 2822 Erica Place. What began as a solo practice has grown into a boutique team of five clinicians, a practice that has earned the trust and respect of clients across the greater Nashville area, and a name that carries weight in the city’s mental health community. As the daughter of Cuban immigrants and a first-generation college graduate, Dr. Barbie knows something about resilience that goes beyond professional training. Reinvention is not a concept she learned from a textbook — it is something she has lived.
“I believe that we all have what we need within ourselves to heal — my role is to facilitate healing, and walking on the path with clients during their journey is a great honor.”
— Dr. Barbie Hessel, NashvilleVoyager
The founding of Simply Being Therapy, then, is not simply a business origin story. It is the story of a woman who listened to something deeper than expectation or convention, and followed it — all the way to a quiet office in Berry Hill, where people come to find themselves again.
Dr. Barbie’s journey didn’t stop at becoming a licensed therapist — she kept going, pursuing an extraordinary depth of advanced training that sets her apart not just in Nashville, but nationally.
A Credential Stack Built for Deep Healing — Dr. Barbie’s Training and Expertise
There is a meaningful difference between a therapist who has completed the minimum training required to practice and one who has spent decades in relentless pursuit of clinical mastery. Dr. Barbie Hessel is emphatically, unambiguously, the latter. The letters after her name — Ed.D., LCSW, SEP, CPATP, RSP — are not decorative. Each one represents decades of post-graduate study, supervised practice, and hard-won expertise. Together, they form one of the most sophisticated credential stacks in Nashville’s mental health landscape.
Let’s translate what those credentials actually mean — not in academic terms, but in terms of what they mean for you as a person seeking healing.
Her Ed.D. from Nova Southeastern University provides a doctoral-level foundation in human development, voice, and identity — a lens that has shaped her understanding of how people become who they are, and how they can become more fully themselves. Her MSSW from the University of Tennessee, with a concentration in trauma treatment, is where the clinical depth began — where she moved from theory into the practice of sitting with human suffering and facilitating change.
Her LCSW — Licensed Clinical Social Worker — is the Tennessee state licensure that authorizes her to practice as a psychotherapist. But it is her post-graduate certifications that place her in genuinely rarified company.
The SEP designation — Somatic Experiencing Practitioner — represents years of advanced, post-graduate training in the body-based trauma resolution method developed by Dr. Peter Levine. Credentialed through Somatic Experiencing International, the SEP training is a multi-year commitment that transforms not just how a therapist works, but how they understand the human nervous system. Very few practitioners in Tennessee hold this credential at the full practitioner level.
Her EMDR Level II training — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — places her among the ranks of therapists trained in one of the most rigorously research-validated trauma treatment modalities in the world, as recognized by the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA). EMDR has decades of peer-reviewed research supporting its effectiveness for PTSD and complex trauma, and Dr. Barbie’s Level II training equips her to work with even the most layered and challenging trauma presentations.
The RSP — Registered Jungian Sandplay Therapist — speaks to her commitment to depth psychology and the power of the symbolic, non-verbal, unconscious dimensions of healing. Rooted in the work of Carl Jung, sandplay therapy allows clients to create expressive, symbolic worlds using sand and figurines — accessing the parts of the psyche that are preverbal, dissociated, or simply beyond the reach of language. It is a modality that requires specialized training and a particular kind of clinical patience, and Dr. Barbie brings both.
Perhaps most strikingly, Dr. Barbie is a Certified Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Provider (CPATP) — one of the most cutting-edge and still relatively rare certifications in the mental health field today. This credential positions her at the forefront of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in Nashville, bringing evidence-based, carefully structured psychedelic-assisted treatment to clients for whom traditional methods have fallen short.
Beyond these core credentials, Dr. Barbie’s clinical toolkit includes IFS (Internal Family Systems), TF-CBT (Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), psychotherapeutic yoga, mindfulness, and sound-based healing practices. She also holds a supervisory role — serving as a clinical supervisor for LCSWs and providing Somatic Experiencing consultation for trainees — a mark of recognized mastery that extends her impact well beyond her own caseload.
This is not a generalist practice. This is a highly specialized clinician who has spent over a decade building a truly extraordinary depth of expertise — and who brings every layer of it to the work of helping people heal.
Credentials tell you what Dr. Barbie knows — but her clinical philosophy tells you who she is as a healer, and why her approach to trauma treatment feels so fundamentally different from anything most people have encountered before.
The Philosophy of Healing — Somatic, Relational, and Radically Human
There is a quiet revolution happening in how the most forward-thinking therapists understand trauma and healing. It is a revolution built on a single insight, one that sounds simple but carries enormous implications: the body keeps the score. Insight alone — the kind that emerges from traditional talk therapy, from understanding your childhood or naming your patterns — is often not enough. Real healing, lasting healing, requires something more. It requires working with the nervous system, with the body’s instinctual intelligence, with the signals and sensations that live below the level of conscious thought.
This understanding is the bedrock of Dr. Barbie Hessel’s clinical philosophy, and it is what makes Simply Being Therapy feel categorically different from many other practices you might encounter.
“My path to becoming a therapist was not a straight line,” she shared in a January 2026 conversation with NashvilleVoyager. “Professionally, I began my career with a strong foundation in traditional talk therapy, but over time I realized that insight alone often isn’t enough—especially for trauma, anxiety, and long-standing patterns that live in the body and nervous system. That curiosity led me into deeper, trauma-informed work.”
The somatic framework that runs through all of Dr. Barbie’s work operates from the understanding that trauma is not primarily a psychological event — it is a physiological one. When the nervous system encounters overwhelming experience, it responds with survival strategies — fight, flight, freeze — that can become lodged in the body long after the original threat has passed. Traditional talk therapy can help a person understand this intellectually. Somatic work helps them complete it — to move through the incomplete survival responses that have been keeping the nervous system in a state of chronic activation, and to restore a genuine sense of safety in the body.
Equally central to Dr. Barbie’s approach is the relational foundation of her work. She believes that the therapeutic relationship itself is not simply a vehicle for delivering techniques — it is the treatment. Attunement, consistency, and emotional safety are not extras or soft add-ons to clinical rigor. They are the conditions under which healing becomes possible. “Therapy here is not rushed or transactional — it’s relational, thoughtful, and deeply human. We believe the relationship itself is a powerful agent of healing,” she has said. This conviction shapes everything about how Simply Being Therapy operates: the pace of the work, the way sessions are structured, the culture of the practice itself.
Running beneath all of this is a deep Jungian current. Carl Jung’s concepts of depth psychology — the unconscious, the archetypes, the process of individuation — inform not just the sandplay modality Dr. Barbie is certified in, but her entire understanding of what it means to heal. Individuation, in Jung’s framework, is the lifelong process of becoming more fully oneself — of integrating the hidden and disowned parts of the psyche into a more whole, more authentic self. This is precisely what Dr. Barbie is guiding her clients toward, session by session, week by week.
“Healing doesn’t require fixing what’s broken — it’s about learning how to be with ourselves more honestly and compassionately. At its core, my work is about helping people come home to themselves — and that’s a privilege I don’t take lightly.”
— Dr. Barbie Hessel
Her belief in pace deserves particular emphasis. Simply Being Therapy works slowly and intentionally. There is no rushing the nervous system — no checklist of symptoms to resolve by session eight, no pressure to be “better” on a timeline that has nothing to do with the actual process of healing. This is one of the most radical and most important things about Dr. Barbie’s approach: she trusts the process, and she trusts her clients’ inherent capacity for healing. The work unfolds at the pace that is right for each individual, because healing is not one-size-fits-all.
This philosophy, then, is not simply a methodology. It is a way of being in relationship — with clients, with the work, with the mystery of what it means to be human. It is the philosophical heartbeat of Simply Being Therapy, and it is what makes the practice a genuinely distinctive destination for people who have tried other approaches and found them insufficient.
With this philosophy as her compass, Dr. Barbie has developed deep expertise in some of the most challenging and sensitive areas of trauma work — areas where many practitioners fear to tread, and where her training and temperament make her uniquely equipped.
Specializing in What Others Avoid — Complex Trauma, Sexual Trauma, and the Clients Who Need More
If you have been searching for a trauma therapist in Nashville, TN and found yourself feeling discouraged — wondering if any therapist can truly understand the specific, layered, deeply personal weight of what you’ve been carrying — this section is written for you.
There is a significant difference between a therapist who has studied trauma in a graduate-level course and one who has spent years working with the full complexity of human wounding. Dr. Barbie Hessel is the latter. Her specializations are not items on a marketing checklist — they are the result of years of formative clinical experience, advanced training, and a genuine calling toward the most sensitive and underserved areas of trauma work.
Her primary specializations include complex trauma, sexual trauma, childhood sexual abuse (CSA), PTSD, chronic stress, anxiety disorders, women’s issues, and life transitions. These areas overlap and interweave in ways that are rarely simple, and that is precisely why the breadth and depth of Dr. Barbie’s training matters so much. Her years at the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville were foundational in ways that cannot be replicated by continuing education courses or workshop weekends. She learned to hold the most sensitive, layered, and often pre-verbal presentations of trauma with skill and without flinching — and that capacity lives in her clinical body as lived knowledge, not just theoretical understanding.
The clients who most often find their way to Simply Being Therapy are adults who are, in Dr. Barbie’s own words, “insightful, capable, and often high-functioning on the outside, yet internally exhausted.” They are people who have learned to keep it together — at work, in relationships, in the world — while quietly carrying something very heavy inside. Many have tried therapy before. Some have tried it multiple times. They found it helpful to a point, but not deep enough — not able to reach the parts that hold the oldest wounds. They are looking for something more than coping strategies. They are looking for real healing.
Complex trauma is worth naming carefully here, because it is still widely misunderstood. It is not a single event — not a car accident or a natural disaster — but rather the cumulative impact of chronic, relational, often early-life wounding. Emotional neglect, growing up in an unsafe or unpredictable home, childhood sexual abuse, chronic invalidation — these are the experiences that shape the nervous system, the attachment system, and the sense of self at the deepest levels. They do not resolve through insight alone, and they do not respond to generic, protocol-driven therapy. Dr. Barbie’s training across Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, and Jungian sandplay uniquely equips her to work with these layered, complex presentations in a way that most clinicians are simply not trained to do.
Her approach to sexual trauma specifically is trauma-informed at every dimension of the clinical encounter — the pacing of sessions, the language used, the attention to body signals, and the relational safety that makes disclosure and processing possible. This is an area where clinical skill and human sensitivity must work in perfect concert, and it is an area where Dr. Barbie’s experience at the Sexual Assault Center laid an irreplaceable foundation.
It is also worth noting that many of the clients who come to Simply Being Therapy don’t initially identify as trauma survivors at all. They come because of anxiety that won’t quiet, depression that doesn’t fully lift, burnout that rest doesn’t fix, or a persistent feeling that they are disconnected from themselves or living a life that doesn’t quite fit. Dr. Barbie understands that these presentations often have traumatic roots even when they don’t look like “trauma” on the surface. Anxiety, depression, and burnout are frequently the body’s expression of something older and deeper — and treating them effectively requires going to that deeper level.
Her supervisory role adds another dimension to this picture. As a clinical supervisor for LCSWs and a Somatic Experiencing consultation provider for trainees, Dr. Barbie is not only healing clients — she is training the next generation of trauma-informed clinicians in Nashville. Her impact, in this sense, is multiplied far beyond the walls of her own office.
What makes Dr. Barbie’s work particularly groundbreaking is not just the depth of her specialization, but the way she bridges multiple healing paradigms — including one of the most exciting and evidence-supported frontiers in modern trauma treatment.
On the Frontier — Somatic, Jungian, and Psychedelic-Assisted Healing, Integrated
The most powerful healing approaches in modern trauma treatment are not competing with one another. They are convergent — each one addressing a different dimension of the same essential wound. And in the hands of a clinician with the breadth of Dr. Barbie Hessel’s training, they can be woven together into something genuinely extraordinary.
At the heart of Simply Being Therapy’s integrative model are four modalities that together address trauma at every level of human experience: body, memory, psyche, and brain chemistry. Understanding how each works — and why their combination is so clinically powerful — requires a brief, grounded look at what each modality actually does.
Somatic Experiencing (SE), developed by Dr. Peter Levine, begins with the body’s instinctual responses to threat. When a survival response — fight, flight, or freeze — is interrupted before it can complete, the energy of that response remains trapped in the nervous system, creating the physiological substrate of trauma symptoms. SE works gently and gradually to help the body complete those interrupted responses, releasing trapped energy and restoring the nervous system’s natural capacity for regulation and resilience. As a fully credentialed SEP, Dr. Barbie brings the full depth of this methodology to her clinical work.
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — works at the level of memory processing. Traumatic memories, unlike ordinary memories, are stored in a fragmented, emotionally charged way that makes them feel perpetually present rather than past. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation — often guided eye movements — to activate the brain’s natural information processing system, allowing traumatic memories to be reprocessed and integrated so that they lose their charge. With EMDR Level II training and recognition from EMDRIA, Dr. Barbie can work with even the most complex and layered trauma histories.
Jungian Sandplay, in which clients create symbolic worlds using sand and miniature figurines, works at the level of the unconscious and the pre-verbal. For trauma that occurred before language developed, or for aspects of experience that cannot yet be spoken — dissociated parts, buried grief, archetypal wounds — sandplay provides a medium through which the psyche can express and begin to integrate what words cannot reach. This modality requires not just technical training but a deep fluency in symbolic language, Jungian depth psychology, and the patience to hold space for a process that operates on its own timeline.
“We are, most recently, learning more about the use of psychedelic psychotherapy, particularly for the treatment of trauma,” Dr. Barbie noted in her 2023 NashvilleVoyager feature. Today, as a Certified Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Provider (CPATP), she has moved from learning to leading in this space. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP), her current focus within psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, pairs the neuroplasticity-enhancing effects of ketamine with structured psychotherapeutic support, creating windows of expanded therapeutic access that are often not available through conventional means.
The clinical rationale for KAP is robust and growing. Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that in a cohort of clients receiving ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, 91% showed improvement in generalized anxiety, 79% showed improvement in depression, and 86% of PTSD-positive participants demonstrated meaningful improvement. More recent research published through NIH/PubMed Central has examined the specific combination of ketamine-assisted therapy with EMDR, finding that the neuroplastic state induced by ketamine may significantly enhance the processing depth achievable through EMDR — a combination that Dr. Barbie is uniquely positioned to offer given her training in both modalities. For additional clinical context on how EMDR and ketamine work together, the EMDRIA blog provides thoughtful, research-grounded exploration of this emerging integration.
The integration logic behind Simply Being Therapy’s model is elegant in its coherence. SE calms and regulates the nervous system, creating a safe physiological foundation for deeper work. EMDR processes the charged traumatic memories that keep the past alive in the present. Jungian sandplay accesses the symbolic, unconscious self — the parts that are pre-verbal, dissociated, or mythologically encoded. KAP opens neurological windows for deeper processing and integration that the ordinary therapeutic frame cannot always reach. Together, these modalities address trauma at every level — body, memory, psyche, and neurochemistry.
This integrated model is rare. Very few practitioners nationally — and even fewer in Nashville — hold the training depth across all four of these domains simultaneously. To find a somatic therapist in Nashville who is also an EMDR-trained clinician, a Jungian sandplay specialist, and a certified psychedelic-assisted therapy provider is, quite simply, to find Dr. Barbie Hessel.
Dr. Barbie’s clinical innovation hasn’t gone unnoticed — her voice and vision have made her a recognized thought leader in Nashville’s growing mental health community, with a platform that reaches far beyond the therapy room.
A Voice Nashville Trusts — Thought Leadership, Published Work, and Community Impact
There is a particular kind of authority that doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly, over years, through the consistency of showing up — for clients, for the community, for the larger cultural conversation about what it means to heal. Dr. Barbie Hessel has that kind of authority in Nashville, and the evidence is visible in the ongoing recognition she has received across multiple platforms and in multiple years.
NashvilleVoyager — Nashville’s premier platform for celebrating the city’s most inspiring stories — has featured Dr. Barbie on three separate occasions: August 2022, May 2023, and January 2026. This is not accidental. Three features across nearly four years reflect sustained, genuine community recognition — the kind that is earned through consistent excellence, not manufactured through self-promotion. Each feature has documented a new chapter of the practice’s evolution: the initial founding and vision in 2022, the expansion and introduction of Simply Be Well in 2023, and a deeper, more philosophical portrait of Dr. Barbie’s clinical identity and approach in 2026.
Beyond press recognition, Dr. Barbie has established herself as a genuine thought leader in the broader wellness and psychology space. Her recent piece on Elephant Journal — “Why Are We So Fascinated by Obsession?” — is a compelling example of what she does at her best: taking complex psychological frameworks (Jungian individuation, attachment theory, Freudian drive theory) and weaving them into an accessible, culturally engaged exploration of the human experience. Reading the piece, you encounter a clinician who is not just practiced in these frameworks but genuinely alive to them — someone who watches a film with her therapeutic mind fully engaged, who sees in the cultural fascination with obsession a mirror of something fundamentally universal about human longing and the search for self. Her writing reflects her clinical philosophy: warm, intellectually curious, and rooted in a deep respect for the complexity of human experience. You can follow her growing body of published work through her Elephant Journal author profile.
The community dimension of Simply Being Therapy extends well beyond the individual therapy room. Dr. Barbie has built a practice that functions as a genuine community wellness hub. Sound baths, tea ceremonies, group hypnosis sessions, eco-therapy groups, corporate wellness programs, and community wellness events have all been part of the practice’s offerings — a reflection of her belief that healing is not only an individual endeavor, but a communal one. The @simplybeingtherapy Instagram functions as a living calendar and community gathering point, documenting ongoing retreats, workshops, and collaborations — including joint retreats with fellow somatic practitioners.
She is also the co-founder of Simply Be Well, a sensory wellness brand she created alongside partner Christi Sidwell. Simply Be Well offers carefully curated wellness products designed to help people regulate their nervous systems through the senses: aromatherapy inhalers, signature teas, and the Glimmer journal — each one a tangible extension of the clinical philosophy that runs through Simply Being Therapy. The idea that healing is something that can be supported not just in the therapy room but in the sensory dimensions of everyday life is a distinctly Dr. Barbie contribution to Nashville’s wellness landscape.
And then there is her supervisory work — the ripple effect that extends beyond any individual client relationship. As a clinical supervisor for LCSWs and a Somatic Experiencing consultation provider for trainees, Dr. Barbie is ensuring that the trauma-informed, somatic, relational approach that defines Simply Being Therapy is carried forward by the next generation of Nashville clinicians. This is not a small thing. It is how one exceptional practitioner’s values and methods multiply themselves through an entire professional community over time.
Everything Dr. Barbie has built — the training, the philosophy, the community presence, the published voice — flows into a single, coherent vision for Simply Being Therapy and what she wants it to mean for Nashville.
The Vision — What Simply Being Therapy Stands For, and Why It Matters
Simply Being Therapy was founded on a single, clear intention. Not a mission statement designed by committee. Not a brand positioning document. A human intention, held by a person who had spent years in the field and knew exactly what was missing, and exactly what she wanted to create.
“I founded Simply Being Therapy with the intention of creating a space that feels grounded, relational, and deeply human — not clinical or rushed,” Dr. Barbie has said. That intention is evident in every dimension of the practice — in the physical warmth of the Berry Hill office, in the pace at which the clinical work unfolds, in the culture that Dr. Barbie has cultivated among her team of clinicians, and in the language that the practice uses to talk about healing.
The name itself is a philosophy. Simply being — not achieving, not performing, not becoming something other than what you already are. Being present. Being met. Being witnessed in your actual experience rather than in the version of yourself that you’ve learned to present to the world. For clients who have spent years managing, coping, and holding it together, this invitation to simply be is often one of the most radical and liberating things they have ever received.
What sets Simply Being Therapy apart from other practices in Nashville is a combination of factors that individually might each be found elsewhere — but together, form something genuinely distinctive.
The practice operates on a boutique model — small enough to provide deep, individualized attention to every client, and strong enough in the diversity and depth of its team to offer a genuine range of clinical specialties. There is no production-line therapy happening here. Each clinician knows their clients, knows the context of their lives, and brings their full presence to every session.
The clinical approach is truly integrative in a way that goes beyond collecting modalities. Treatment at Simply Being Therapy is not protocol-driven — it is collaborative. Dr. Barbie and each client build a therapeutic map together, drawing on whichever combination of SE, EMDR, sandplay, IFS, yoga, mindfulness, or psychedelic-assisted therapy serves that particular person’s particular healing at any given moment. This flexibility is possible only because the clinical depth is genuine — because the modalities are truly integrated into Dr. Barbie’s clinical identity, not simply available on a menu.
The practice’s commitment to clinical depth and ethical care extends through the supervisory layer. Dr. Barbie’s role as a clinical supervisor ensures that the entire Simply Being Therapy team upholds the same standards she has spent decades developing — that the culture of the practice, not just the founder’s personal practice, reflects those values.
Looking forward, Dr. Barbie’s vision for Simply Being Therapy is to continue expanding integrative offerings — including the growth of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy services — while deepening community wellness programming and preserving the intimacy and integrity that have always defined the practice. Growth in service of the mission, not growth for its own sake.
If you are looking for an EMDR therapist in Nashville, a somatic therapist in Nashville, or a trauma therapist in Nashville, TN who brings the full depth of clinical expertise — doctoral-level training, rare advanced certifications, years of formative clinical experience, and a philosophy built on the belief that every person has within them what they need to heal — you have found Simply Being Therapy. And you have found Dr. Barbie Hessel, who built this practice for exactly you.
The Simply Being Therapy space at 2822 Erica Place, Berry Hill, Nashville — where healing happens.
Healing Is Possible — And It Begins with the Right Guide
We began in a quiet office in Berry Hill — soft light, a warm cup of tea, a sense of permission to arrive as you are. We end there too, because that is where healing lives. Not in credentials on a wall (though those matter), not in theories and frameworks (though those matter too), but in the quality of presence that a skilled, deeply human clinician brings to the room. That is what Dr. Barbie Hessel offers.
She is, by any measure, one of Nashville’s most distinctively trained trauma therapists — a somatic practitioner, a pioneer in psychedelic-assisted therapy, a Jungian depth psychologist, an EMDR clinician, a published thinker, and a community builder. But she is also, at the most essential level, a person who came to this work because she believed in it — who left a successful career not out of dissatisfaction but out of calling, and who has spent every year since building something that reflects her deepest values.
Her core conviction, expressed in her own words, is this: healing doesn’t require fixing what’s broken — it’s about learning how to be with ourselves more honestly and compassionately. If that sentence lands somewhere in your body, if it names something you have been searching for, then Simply Being Therapy is likely the place — and Dr. Barbie Hessel is likely the guide — you have been looking for.
Reaching out for help is itself an act of courage. At Simply Being Therapy, that courage is honored.
Ready to Begin Your Healing Journey?
Whether you’re navigating trauma, anxiety, a major life transition, or simply the feeling that something inside you has been waiting to be heard — Dr. Barbie Hessel and the Simply Being Therapy team are here.
Simply Being Therapy
📍 2822 Erica Place, Nashville, TN 37204
📞 (615) 601-1182
🌐 Schedule a consultation at simplybeingtherapy.com
Want to learn more about Dr. Barbie’s approach and credentials? Read her full bio here.
Stay connected with Simply Being Therapy’s community offerings, workshops, and thought leadership on Instagram: @simplybeingtherapy